First Impressions
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This phone is NOT classified as a “smart phone” and therefore does not require a data plan. It actually is a smart phone, but I’ll get to that in a moment. My first impressions with this phone were completely false. I didn’t consider this phone for myself, but my wife and kids just wanted a phone and my daughter’s only requirement was that it provide texting. I wasn’t even going to consider this phone for even those simple tasks because it looked like a really cheapo knock-off with less than basic features and a seemingly fake UI screen and a proprietary OS without even the possibility to download apps or write apps.
Boy was I wrong!!! Read below for the details.
Hardware Durability
This phone is small and feels very light. It feels like a cheap phone. But, that’s just because of it’s light weight. It’s just perception.
Ease of Use
Using the phone for standard voice calls is straight forward. The phone is actually a small computer (like other smart phones) that also has voice capabilities. It’s screen is fairly high resolution and surprisingly, has a full GUI with icons and a touch screen interface, video keyboard (like a phone’s number pad with letters on it), and a full QWERTY keyboard when you rotate the phone to landscape mode.
Features
Screen: It has a small 3.2” screen, but a decent resolution for such a low cost phone at 640×360! It’s more than good enough for decent web browsing and games.
OS: Some kind of proprietary Nokia OS. I’ve been unable to find out what the name of this OS is, but it’s unlikely that you’re familiar with it. It’s not Windows Mobile, or iOS, nor Android. In most cases, if it’s not one of those three, I’d recommend staying away from it, but for how cheap this phone is and how powerful it is, I’ll make an exception for this phone.
The screen is a touch sensitive screen. It does NOT do multi-touch though. The GUI has a nice vibration feedback when you touch an item that the phone registers as a menu selection or icon or menu selection. This feels especially good when dialing on the video keyboard.
Networking: You can purchase an unlimited data plan for this phone for a low cost of $10/mo. One of the great things about this phone is that it has all the features of a smart phone, but isn’t classified as one so you get 2 great side effects of that:
- You don’t have to buy a data plan if you don’t want to.
- If you do want to buy a data plan, it’s 1/3 the cost of a data plan for a so called “smart phone”.
If you don’t have a data plan, there’s no other “supported” way to get to the internet, unlike other phones where you can plug them into your PC’s USB port and borrow your PC’s internet connection, or use your wireless LAN. But, there are some hacks to use the Bluetooth wireless connection to hop onto your PC’s internet connection. This phone does NOT have wireless LAN hardware.
Pre-Installed Software: There are a few games pre-installed and plenty more to download. As a matter of fact, to my surprise, there’s a vibrant app developer community writing plenty of apps for this phone including games and utilities. Amazingly, one of the apps built into the phone is a very nice GPS navigation application with turn by turn directions. The maps are already pre-installed in the phone so you don’t need an internet connection (unlike Android phones). The GPS navigator app works surprisingly well. It’s good enough to replace your stand-alone GPS device. Of course, you’ve got your contacts list, calculator, calendar, phone, camera, gallery, etc…
GPS: As mentioned above, this device has a built in GPS and GPS navigation software built in. It’s pretty high quality for what you expect out of a $72 phone.
Compass: Not sure on this one. Stay tuned. I’ll find out and update this article.
Accelerometer: Like the iPhone and Android phones, this “discount bin” phone has an accelerometer and many games and apps take advantage of it. The screen automatically adjusts between portrait or landscape depending on which way you hold it.
Phone: Of course, it makes phone calls. The video keyboard is really nice with the vibration feedback as your touch dial.
Wireless LAN: This model does NOT have home wireless LAN capability.
BlueTooth: Bluetooth is built in, so you should be able to pair this phone with just about any standard Bluetooth devices.
Micro USB: This phone uses the standard Micro USB connector for charging and data sync with your PC. It comes with a 3” Micro USB cable to connect it to your PC. Your phone essentially becomes a USB flash drive dongle. The power adapter does not use the USB port though.
Memory:
Battery: 70MB internal memory. Comes with a 4GB MicroSD card, upgradable to 16GB.
Outlook Sync: It can sync with Outlook, but I’ve not been able to do this yet. Stay tuned and I’ll update this article.
E-Mail: If you have a data plan, you can send and receive e-mail from this device and I think it’ll sync your e-mail with Outlook. We’re not using this feature, so I can’t give you any more specifics.
Web: It has a decent little web browser built in. Of course, if you don’t have a data plan, it’s useless. I don’t have a data plan with any of these phones on my plan, so I’ve not been able to test all the features (JavaScript, proper rendering, video playback, audio playback, etc…)
Tethering: YES!
Data Plan: Not required, but with T-Mobile, you can get an unlimited data plan for $10/mo which lets you download apps from the app store, browse the web, and lets your apps access the internet, Oh! and e-mail too, of course.
Still Shot Camera: 2 megapixel camera. The pictures look pretty decent. Of course, this is not to be used as your primary camera, but it is pretty decent for most candid type shots.
Video Camera: Shoots 640×480 at 3 fps.
Texting: Of course.
Software Development: C++ using Nokia’s SDK. You request the SDK from them and I believe there’s a $99 registration fee.
Conclusion:
At first glance, I thought this phone was complete junk, but after looking at it and playing around with it, this is one of those secret golden treasures that you kind of want to keep to yourself so nobody else spoils it. But I’ve gotta tell ya, I was more than pleasantly surprised by the capabilities of this phone… so much so that I got THREE of them for my wife and kids. They have been using them for about 3 weeks now and are all very very happy with them (and this is WITHOUT a data plan!)
This phone is by far the best bang for your buck you’re going to find. It has almost all the features of the high-end, expensive phones. It’s a smart phone that’s not classified as one and therefore your data options are greater and cheaper. If you don’t want to spend big bucks on a phone and continuous, expensive monthly data fees, but you still want the features of a high-end smart phone, you can’t beat this phone with a stick.
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